


Antigone, or Bury Your Dead

by delgaserasca



Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-18 22:07:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1444609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delgaserasca/pseuds/delgaserasca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ros in season 8. The road from the end to the means.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Antigone, or Bury Your Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Written for femgenficathon; originally posted to LJ.

>   
> **ANTIGONE**   
> _O city of my fathers in the land of Thebe! O ye gods, eldest of our race! - they lead me hence–now, now–they tarry not! Behold me, princes of Thebes, the last daughter of the house of your kings, –see what I suffer, and from whom, because I feared to cast away the fear of Heaven!_   
> 
> 
>   
> 
> 
> **Antigone** (pronounced /ænˈtɪɡəni/; Greek Ἀντιγόνη). The name may be taken to mean "unbending", coming from "anti-" (against, opposed to) and "-gon / -gony" (corner, bend, angle; ex: polygon).  
> 

 

 

 

**I.**

In the time it takes the bullet to move from action to consequence, Ros feels a moment of pure regret. It is sharp and distinct, running from her finger to her hand to her elbow, up into her body and right down to her toes. Shocking. Instantaneous. Awful.

She sees it coming before it happens; Jo crumbles, confusion marring her face, or maybe pity. Ros feels tired, feels hot and then cold in quick succession; thinks, no, and oh god, and what a waste.

 

 

 

 

There are no details to the day. One grey sky is much like another; one autumn breeze no different from the next. Ros wakes, dresses, works by rote. She sees the psychologist before Harry instructs her to go. She has never been afraid to face the inevitable.

He's a slightly chubby man in a worn brown jumper. The office smells faintly of menthol cigarettes and cheap coffee, and Ros hates him on instinct. Sat opposite him, she runs her fingers lightly across the leather-bound armrest before crossing her hands at the wrist. She resents the pressing need she feels to explain herself to him, to justify her actions. Her father had derided the habit, disapproving of visible displays of want. _Don't press for attention, Rosalind; it doesn't become you_. Twenty years or more, and still the desire presents itself. Sometimes she wants to plead.

She doesn't, of course. Mentions she has had trouble sleeping, mentions she is sorry over what has happened - careful to say, 'the shooting', not 'I shot Jo' - mentions it is difficult but she knows, unfortunately, that a necessary deed is not made easier by indecision.

_I see,_ the psychologist murmurs, pencil scratching uselessly across feint-ruled paper, _and what is it that prevents you from sleeping?_ Stupid question, she thinks, Jo's wide-eyed surprise flashing violently from memory. Stupid oaf. Stupid, stupid man.

She lies, makes up a story about regret. Slips truth in between the lines. Wonders if he will notice.

He doesn't. Stupid, stupid man.

 

 

 

 

Ros takes to debriefing Lucas after his every encounter with Sarah, not trusting him to report everything he knows. It isn't that she thinks he is disinclined to reveal his hand, just that she knows how easy it is to lie on paper, to omit details with a sleight of hand. Lucas thinks she doesn't think him capable; he is wrong. Ros can't afford not to be thorough.

It startles her, sometimes, that he can remind her so much of Adam. Whilst true that Lucas lacks that kernel of unkindness that could make Adam so bitter, they share an edge of desperation that ignites innovation and wilful ignorance of fact. Sometimes Ros thinks she ought to use the taser again; wonders if that will wake Lucas from his stupor. He is too soft, she thinks, reading over his notes. He wants to trust in something so much. Lucas walks around London still half-asleep, as though waking is the dream, and the nightmare of Russia is yet a reality. It's a luxury she has never afforded herself, this wanton disregard for reality.

Sometimes she sees in him flashes of Adam's raw recklessness – remembers Fiona and thinks of Elizabeta; looks at Sarah and sees Ana – looks at Lucas and wants to hold his face in her hands and shake him. But that never worked with Adam, and it won't work with Lucas. Instead, she is doubly precise, interrogating his intentions, interrogating what he believes are Sarah's intentions. She makes him repeat himself, asks him the same question two different ways and compare the answers afterwards. It doesn't make her feel better, but it's something tangible at least. She can hold it to the light and prove that she did everything to watch his back.

Later he asks her if she wants to go out for a drink. _Lucas_ , she deadpans, almost amused, _are you worried about me?_

_Yes_ , he says, and that's that. They take a cab to a place Lucas knows on the other side of the city, and she orders wine whilst he sips at vodka. Old habits die hard, she knows, but she wishes he wouldn't play with his food.

 

 

 

 

The dreams, when they come, are not what she would have expected. A memory of her mother dressing in heels and pearls, her wedding ring glinting beneath the light in the long hall. A forged remembrance of a distant uncle found hanging from the rafters of his bathroom, and her father's mocking dismissal of his quandaries. Connie James and the bitter, bitter impassivity that passed for stoicism when she was caught trying to flee the grid.

Sometimes she dreams of her father; sometimes of Adam, of Zaf, of Jack Colville. Sometimes she dreams nonsense, dreams of driving backwards in a car that will never stop, along a road that is swiftly coming to an end.

She never dreams of Jo because she never sleeps long enough to do so, but she remembers every detail in unerring clarity. In the last light of day her decisions come back to taunt her. Jo on the roof of Thames House, nicotine-stained nails bitten to the quick. Photos of Jo when she emerged from captivity, black and blue and black again. Jo behind Finn Lambert, suddenly there where she wasn't just moments before, blouse shorn and bloody around the bullet hole Ros put there. In the lift; on the floor; in the ground. Jo. Jo. Jo.

Ros wakes early, takes a shower, makes coffee. Stands in her kitchen at five in the morning and scalds her tongue. Runs a hand through her hair and wonders if it's too early to go to the office. Runs a hand through a hair and holds on tight.

 

 

 

 

**II.**

After Yalta, she thinks, maybe it would have been more sensible to leave and never come back, but it had never been in her nature to back down from a fight, and she spent two listless months in Strasbourg trying to chase leads she didn't have on Zaf's whereabouts before giving up and trying something new. The DGSE can't have been too pleased to have her show up unannounced on their doorstep but neither Harry nor Connie had sounded particularly surprised when the Director had introduced her on the conference call. She could almost hear Harry roll his eyes.

From there she went to Germany by car, and then from Germany to Moscow by air, and then, and then, and then. A city of penance, she had thought, strolling past the Kremlin with her bag in tow. The last time she had been there she had been a child, eighteen or nineteen, always two paces behind her father. He would place his wide palms on her shoulders to prevent her from making her escape. _My daughter, Rosalind._ Almost proud.

Her first few weeks were horrifically unproductive as she attempted to make contacts and build safeguards. She bought a coat to keep out the cold; bought a newspaper to pass the time. Obsessively dismantled, cleaned, and reassembled her gun. There was a cold drop in a fish market one week, and then, three later, another outside the Tretyakov.

It was dull work – slow, and requiring the kind of patience she had never been very good at maintaining. And so she had spent the longer hours continuing the work she had started in London – accessing maps of Iran and documents regarding the unstable political climate. She had made a list of names that led to a handful of places that housed a number of people who might know scant details of where Zaf could be. She never once questioned his survival. He had to be alive, somewhere. If Ruth could die and not be dead, why not he? If Ros could die and come back to life, why not he?

Six months, and still no closer to an answer, and then a phone call from London, and a man dead in his underwear, and another reflected in a bottle on a table in a hotel room too many floors from the ground and too far from home to flee to safety. She had taken what she could find at hand. _Resourceful_ , Jack had once said of her, _adroit_. Desperate times, she had mused in the aftermath, pocketing the fork on her exit, call for the most desperate of measures.

In the end she buried Zaf with Adam, watched as the coffin was lowered into the earth, watched as the soil piled high on top. Adam's son stood by the graveside, clutching a relative's hand. He had caught her eye as she had made to leave, and she'd faltered before turning and heading to the car.

Afterwards she had begged Harry for Section D, her pride shorn from her hands so late in the day, and she had wanted it so keenly – had wanted to know that he forgave her, that she was needed despite her sins.

And thus it had begun.

 

 

 

 

**III.**

Another day, another disaster, another dead man. Lucas nods as he comes through the door, but Ros is too busy looking at the incoming reports on Tariq's monitor to pay him much attention. Later she finds him in the kitchen, pouring cold coffee down the sink, and she watches as he refills the kettle. It's been three days since Lucas handed Oleg Darshavin back to Russia, and less than a fortnight since the incident with The Bendorf Group, and if Ros cocks her ear just so, she can hear bones rattle across the grid.

Lucas makes no indication that he knows she is there, but with bodies being as they are, she knows he knows. There isn't a spook alive that doesn't know when they're not alone.

She makes it a habit not to ask him how he is; knows that the gesture is appreciated when he pushes a mug of tea her way, no milk, no sugar, and barely any tea. She takes a sip, leans back against the counter and watches Lucas in profile as he stirs cream into his coffee in concentric circles. He doesn't once look up from the task.

_Have you spoken to Sarah?_ she asks eventually, thinking of the insidious nature of co-dependence.

_She'll live_ , he mutters, mopping up spilt milk with a kitchen towel. _Have you spoken to the shrink again?_ he barters in return.

_First thing today._ She knows the question is fatuous, but injects enough irritation into her answer to be rewarded with a cruel smirk. Let him think he's won something, she thinks as she stalks from the room, it's not like I have any pride.

 

 

 

No dreams, after Jack. No sleep. She had thought the memory of his blood would wash away other images, but she was wrong. To die, to sleep, she thinks, you're not the only one who read Shakespeare at school, To sleep: perchance to dream. She pads barefoot to the living room at three in the morning; settles onto the couch and reaches for the Macbeth now resting on her unused coffee table. Lucas had retrieved it from Jack's personal affects, pressed it meaningfully into her hands, and she had scowled, tired, tired, and scornful of his intentions. At the time all she could think was, you are in love with a woman who is using you as a means to an end, and once you were in love with your captor. Stop pretending we're the same thing. Stop thinking we have loss in common.

In the end the play is a comfort, a rare one in a year of thwarted desires. She closes her eyes, and thinks of Lady Macbeth, sleepwalking with her palms outstretched, trying to rend blood from her stained hands. She thinks of Connie, at peace when she bid them leave the underground tunnel, laying to rest both her deeds and misdeeds alike. She thinks again of Jo, of the imperceptible nod she had given before Ros had pulled the trigger, and then the blossoming shock on her face, not from the act, but from the pain, the sudden unfurling of death in her gut. Ros remembers dying; remembers fear; wonders if Connie had feared her death, or welcomed it. Wonders if Jo had been scared, or if there hadn't been enough time before her knees buckled and she fell to the floor.

Ros opens her eyes, picks up the play again. She is no Macbeth, Lady or nay. She's washed blood from her hands enough times to know whether its her own or not. Jo died; others lived. The Home Secretary resigned, and even that wasn't her fault. Sometimes good people die for bad reasons, and bad people die for good ones. Lambert was on that floor, too.

She starts at Act V. She reads.

 

 

 

 

In the end, Ruth takes the decision from her, approaching after Baisley is reunited with his daughter, and Ros is left trying to justify her decisions on paper. The other woman carries herself more tightly now, and Ros remembers that she, too, has lost recently, has relinquished a thing that she had once loved. They are not the same people, Ros knows, just as Connie had been wrong to paint them with the same brush, but she and Ruth share renaissance and that means something to Ros, even if it shouldn't.

Ruth's face is pinched and drawn with words unsaid. Ros lets her faff around the room before turning to face her, leaning as casually as she can against her desk, arms folded against whatever will come next. Lamps glow hotly in the corners of empty pens as Ruth continues to mull around the room, fussing with paper and switching off monitors as she goes. Eventually she stops herself, then turns. They face one another in the quiet of the grid. Somewhere a fluorescent bulb flickers, buzzing in resistance. Down the hall someone laughs, a foreign sound, impinging rudely on the stillness of the space between them. Ros' fingers itch in anticipation; she wants to tap them against the crooks of her elbows, but she doesn't. She waits.

_I don't—_ Ruth begins in a rush, cutting herself off before she has even started. She shakes her head sadly, disapprovingly. _Why do you always choose to lie?_ She means to be unkind and yet there is sympathy there, too, battling against the instinct to hurt. Ros can hear every unsaid word in Ruth's head, can feel them striking her at odds and angles. There is pity there, beneath the question, and she has no want of it. Instead, she straightens, dusts off her skirt.

_I don't if I can help it._

_That's not an answer_ , Ruth rebuts, but her voice is softer now. _You don't have to choose to be this way. You could— you could not. Maybe. No-one would think any less of you for telling the truth every now and then._

It's the most Ruth has said to her since her return, the most that has been said that isn't about work, even if everything is about work. It's not a question, though, and Ros doesn't have an answer. She turns back to her desk, reaches for her handbag.

_I don't blame you_ , Ruth adds, tentatively, though whether she means Jo, or Baisley, or Zaf, or even that first betrayal that led to a boat that sailed to an island that housed a boy who had a father who was shot and killed-- Ros doesn't know. She only knows that there is no blame to be had, and whether Ruth likes it or not, Ros does not hold herself accountable for actions that fall outside the realm of her control.

She nods anyway, looks Ruth in the eye just once, then nods again. The reassurance is another lie, but she can live with it. It will do. It will do for now.

**end.**

> you can't erase who you are.  
>  you can't erase what you know.  
>  **sandra cisneros**  
> 

  


**Author's Note:**

> Epigraph from Sophocles' _Antigone_. Extract from Shakespeare's _Hamlet_.


End file.
